Question about torrents (asking for a friend)

Post Reply New Topic

So a friend of a friend told me he was searching for torrents online. He told me that obscure items often have only one seed listed, whereas the most popular items might have around 100 seeds.

I was thinking that even 100 sounds surprisingly low. If a website lists a torrent as having 100 seeds, what does that mean in practice? Does that mean that at that moment there are a grand total of only 100 people on the entire planet who have that torrent file on their computer and who are using a torrent client at that moment?

Not an expert by any means, but this is my understanding:

Most people's torrent clients will have a limit imposed on the number of active torrents. So while they may have hundreds of complete movies on their computer, the client will only allow them to share data from a few at a time. This is a user defined setting so you can choose to seed nothing, or a few files at a time - obviously your bandwidth and data charges are going to inform how you make this decision.

Also worth noting that you have to have the torrent file in your client as well as the data file itself otherwise it won't know you have the file to seed. People will often periodically delete their torrent files even if they keep the actual data.

I don't know how a client picks which torrents to seed, whether it's based on rarity or just order of request. And I don't know whether the number of seeds that's displayed is the number of complete copies in the world or just the number of clients actively seeding it at that time.